1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to memory circuit design methodologies and programs for designing digital memory circuits, and more particularly to a method and computer program for estimating cell failure rates in cell arrays.
2. Description of the Related Art
As memory array architectures are pushed to their practical limits by increasing requirements for density and speed, accurately estimating the cell failure rate of a design becomes increasingly critical. Since a finite number of redundant rows and/or columns is available to replace those containing defective cells, a number of failed cells above this level of redundancy will yield a defective device. The number of defective devices, or device yield is then directly related to the cell failure rate. The larger arrays being fabricated today have increasingly stringent failure rate control requirements. For example, in order to achieve a yield of 90% in a one-million cell array without redundancy, a failure rate below 5σ must be held.
Traditional techniques such as Monte-Carlo analysis produce accurate results at a cost of a large number of iterations, due to the random sampling of the entire probability space of the independent variables that are treated in the analysis. As the cell failure rate decreases, the number of samples and iterations required for accurate analysis becomes increasingly large, because of the relatively sparse distribution of samples in the distribution tail(s) that correspond to failed cells. The effect of circuit changes on cell read and writeability, as well as minimum read and write cycle times and margins are difficult to estimate at very low failure rate levels, so such low failure rates cause further complications for adjusting designs to achieve the best result.
Techniques other than Monte-Carlo analysis have been implemented for estimating cell failure rates, each with related drawbacks. Sensitivity analysis is a well-known technique in which the gradients of the various independent variables are used to determine the bounds of the non-failure confidence region. However, accurate estimates of the failure rate are not typically produced by sensitivity analysis, as sensitivity analysis by its very nature cannot determine the exact overlapping impact of all independent variables on the cell failure rate at once. Another technique that can accurately estimate the failure rate is the grid analysis approach, in which the grid size can be made arbitrarily small. However, the number of simulations increases exponentially with the number of independent variables and typically a large amount of custom coded program control (scripting) must be employed to direct the analysis.
It is therefore desirable to provide a method for accurately and efficiently determining cell failure rates under extremely low failure rate conditions.